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Tag: ACLU

The Justice Department is trying to force Facebook to disclose the names of everyone who interacted with an event page about an anti-Donald Trump rally during the presidential inauguration.

If the social media giant complies with warrants issued by the DOJ, the federal government would receive the Facebook accounts of everyone who “liked” the disruptj20 page and signed up to attend the protest, Gizmodo reports.

The ACLU says the Justice Department’s warrants are a violation of the First and Fourth amendments.

“What is particularly chilling about these warrants is that anti-administration political activists are going to have their political associations and views scrutinized by the very administration they are protesting,” ACLU attorney Scott Michelman told CNN.

The FBI ran 23 child pornography websites as part of an investigation to catch pedophiles, according to newly unsealed documents.

It was revealed last year that the FBI took over a child pornography site called Playpen for 13 days to track users internationally. But an affidavit obtained by the ACLU shows that the FBI oversaw nearly two dozen child pornography sites as part of its “network investigate technique,” which is a form of dark web hacking, the New York Daily News reports.

“While Websites 1-23 operate at a government facility, such request data associated with a user’s actions on Websites 1-23 will be collected,” a passage from the documents said.

“Such request data can be paired with data collected by the NIT, however, in order to attempt to identify a particular user and to determine that particular user’s actions on Websites 1-23.”

The ACLU is urging the Justice Department to investigate the use of facial recognition technology to determine whether it violates the rights of millions of Americans and disproportionately affects people of color.

The ACLU cited a recently released report by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology that concluded the controversial technology is used to identify and track people who are doing nothing wrong, like cross the street, WBALTV reports.

In Maryland, for example, police have the ability to use facial recognition technology to search for more than 7 million state driver’s license and ID photos, more than 3 million arrest booking photos and 24.9 mugshots from the FBI’s Next Generation Identification database.

“The database is populated, I think may people with be surprised to hear, by over 7 million driver’s license photos, so every time you go to get a driver’s license you are now submitting to being a participant in a virtual lineup,” ACLU attorney David Rocah said.

The ACLU is concerned that the technology may unfairly target people of color.

“Not only do we not know how frequently it is helpful in finding an offender, how often they get a match and then identify the correct person who committed an offense, we also don’t know the error rate. We don’t know how many false matches, and how many people are falsely accused or wrongly investigated because of incorrect matches,” Rocah said.

The Tucson police and Border Patrol agents are violating the Fourth Amendment rights of Southern Arizonans by immigration checks that often take more than an hour, the ACLU of Arizona wrote in a pair of letters to the two agencies Monday.

Of the 110 traffic stops reviewed by the ACLU by Tucson police between June 2014 and December 2015, a majority lasted longer than one hour, Tucson.com reports.

More than three-quarters of the cases involved “clear or potential constitutional problems,” the ACLU said.

Undocumented immigrant are being stripped of their possessions by Border Patrol agents before being deported back to Mexico with ID or money, advocacy groups allege.

In a complaint with Homeland Security, the ACLU of New Mexico and a coalition of organizations allege that undocumented immigrants were deported with no belongings in 26 cases, CBS News reports.

“DHS will review the complaint once we receive it,” DHS spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said. “DHS has strict standards in place to ensure that detainees’ personal property – including funds, baggage and other effects – is safeguarded and controlled while they are in detention and returned to them when they are released from CBP/ICE custody or removed from the United States. Any allegation of missing property will be thoroughly investigated.”

The groups say immigrants are sometimes sent without their belongings to cities in Mexico where they have no acquaintances.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona recently released a damning report about the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, using documents obtained from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit as evidence of an out-of-control agency that abuses citizens’ constitutional rights with impunity and lacks basic record keeping, oversight or any sense of accountability for its routine violations.

“The records contain recurring examples of Border Patrol agents detaining, searching and terrorizing individuals and entire families at interior checkpoints and in ‘roving patrol’ vehicle stops far into the interior of the country; threatening motorists with assault rifles, electroshock weapons and knives; destroying and confiscating personal property; and interfering with efforts to video record Border Patrol activities,” the ACLU report states. “Above all, these documents show a near-total lack of investigation of, much less discipline for, egregious civil rights abuses; to the contrary, some of the records show Border Patrol tacitly or explicitly encouraging its agents to violate the law.”

Citizens asking why they were stopped were told, for example, that “I don’t have to tell you that” and “We’ll think of something.” One agent said he stopped a man because “the time he is driving to work is also a peak time for smuggling.” When one woman had the audacity to question the authority of the agents who stopped her, they slashed her rear tire, stranding her and her two young children on a hot desert road.

Interior checkpoints – such as the San Clemente station on I-5 – which may be located up to 100 miles from the border, also appear to be rather ineffective or unnecessary. Interior checkpoint apprehensions accounted for just 0.74 percent of total apprehensions for the Tucson and Yuma Sectors in 2012 and 2013. One checkpoint, 75 miles north of the border in the Yuma Sector, reported one noncitizen apprehension in three years, but generated multiple civil rights complaints during that time.